At the 1984 Republican National Convention breakfast, the president of American Airlines opened his speech by joking that "gay" was an acronym for "got AIDS yet?" […] Weeks after Hudson's death in 1985, Houston's former mayor outlined his own plan for ending the crisis during a reelection bid: if you want to stop AIDS, he said, "shoot the queers."
Buckley wrote an op-ed in the New York Times proposing that "everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common needle users, and on the buttocks to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals."
Buckley joked to Reagan that his proposed tattoos should read, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," over the buttocks.
The pink triangle, both in its original usage and in its first reclamations, pointed down. But Chris Lione, misremembering the triangle's direction, told the group that it pointed upward, like a pyramid. He chided the group for doubting him. "Boys, I just came from that concentration camp," he told them. "I know what I'm talking about." Johnston was supposed to research the direction of the triangle but failed to do so. And so it went to the printer upside down. This inversion of the triangle came to be read as a gesture of empowerment, and Finkelstein would later hawk it as such. But in actuality, the pink triangle facing upward was essentially a printing error.
Though Silence=Death was widely accepted by the immediate circle of ACT UP, this was not immediately beloved by the gay community writ large. Finkelstein recalled that when he wore a Silence=Death button to dinner one night, his waiter, a gay man, registered his disapproval. "That's a very violent button," he told Finkelstein.
"These are very violent times," Finkelstein shot back.
These sorts of confrontations were not uncommon. One ACT UP member named Joe Ferrari recalled wearing a Silence=Death shirt on Fire Island and being spit on by another gay man.
It was initially suggested that ACT UP's members carry coffins through the parade. One ACT UP member living with AIDS, Griffin Gold, lobbied against this. "Can't you folks think of any other way to represent people with AlDS other than carrying coffins?" he snapped back. "We are living with AIDS," he proclaimed, "not dying with AIDS!"
— It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic, by Jack Lowery (2022)
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